Entries from December 2007 ↓

Like you couldn’t tell. Last night 60 Minutes re-aired an episode I first saw back in October. Their first story was on the success of TV preacher, Joel Osteen. His Lakewood Church in Houston is a rather intimate little congregation housed in an old sports arena that seats 16,000. According to the Dallas Morning News some 47,000 people attend Lakewood each week. More than 7 million viewers tune in weekly to watch Osteen preach and tell them how God is going to be their genie for a week. According to CBS News the congregation takes in about $70 million each year. But that’s just in contributions. All the product sales (books, CD’s and more) garner untold money. But money isn’t what makes Osteen a weenie. His voice, his mannerisms, his face, his slight build do - but primarily it’s his God-wants-you-to-be-rich message.

No matter what religious convictions you hold - or let hit the floor - it seems illogical that God Almighty, the creator of the universe, would exist solely for the purpose of making sure I get a promotion at work, or that the latest AMG I crave would find its way into my garage.

Osteen claims he’s preaching a gospel of hope. That’s why he doesn’t find it necessary to tell people what they’re doing wrong, and how to fix their errors. Osteen declares that people already know what’s wrong in their life. He finds no need to condemn sin. I question whether he believe in sin, or righteousness. What is clear - he believes in money. His publisher advanced him $13 million on his last book, “Become A Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Everyday.” But I don’t begrudge him the money. Good for him. Bad for the naive who buy his message though.

It’s not really Joel Osteen who is a weenie (well, okay - he is). The real weenies are the millions who buy what he’s selling. The millions of people who lack sufficient knowledge and wisdom to:
(a) know what the Bible really teaches
(b) to know Joel Osteen isn’t preaching any gospel that Jesus taught (the man who had no where to lay his own head)
(c) to know how shallow and empty his message really is
(d) and to know that profits drive the message.

The gullibility of the public continues to amaze me. What people will gobble up as profound - albeit the tripe of a weenie like Osteen - is almost miraculous. Just remember, Satan has supernatural powers, too. Compare what Osteen preaches with the Gospel of Christ.

God wants you to prosper, says Osteen. Christ says not to fret about having prosperity in this life. Rather He taught to lay up treasures in heaven where moth and rust don’t corrupt.

God wants you to get that promotion, says Osteen. Christ taught that the high would be brought down and the lowly would be exalted. Service and being a servant were consistently taught by Christ.

Good things will happen for you today and tomorrow, says Osteen. Christ said not to worry about tomorrow because the problems of today will be sufficient - but with God’s help we can endure. The Apostle Paul had a thorn in the flesh. We don’t know what it was. We do know Paul wanted it to be removed. Three times he prayed fervently for God to remove it. Osteen’s god isn’t like Paul’s God. God Jehovah told Paul His grace was sufficient - and He refused Paul’s request. Paul would just have to live with his thorn and endure with God’s help. And he did.

Appealing to God for help is vastly different than being arrogant enough to think God will grant us every desire or wish like the proverbial genie. God isn’t a genie. God doesn’t exist to do our good pleasure. Rather, He created us in His image to serve, worship and glorify Him. As God He sets the standards and it’s up to us to measure up by behaving as He’d like.

God isn’t a genie. Osteen, however, is a weenie.

Music Box Dancer - Holdman Christmas Display 2007 from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

Dan Fogelberg died on Sunday morning around 6am of advanced prostate cancer. On his website he wrote a “sermon” encouraging men to get tested annually, something I’m sure he wished he had done.

I first heard Dan Fogelberg when I entered Leisure Landing, a record store just outside the campus of LSU. It was in 1972 and this record - Home Free, his first, had just been released. The store was playing it on their system and I was immediately captivated by everything about it. Every song was a keeper. There was a sadness that I embraced in the songs. A pleasant melancholy.

To The Morning
Stars
More Than Ever
Be On Your Way
Hickory Grove
Long Way Home (Live In the Country)
Looking For A Lady
Anyway I Love You
Wysteria
The River

The album - yes kids this was in the Stone Age of vinyl - was a bit country, bluegrass, folk with subtle rock. Fogelberg was a singer/songwriter. I almost wore out this record. It was among my first CD’s when the digital age came to life. Vinyl junkies like me spent a fortune converting our libraries to the digital format.

Admittedly, I’ve not played it much lately. High Country Snows (1985) was the last CD I remember playing. This week my listening will include some of Dan’s work.

Time marches on. Death shows us how fast. Thirty five years have passed since the release of Home Free. It doesn’t seem so long now.

Not Cross. Not Mont Blanc. Waterman. Specifically a Waterman Hemisphere Ballpoint. Mine looks just like this - black and chrome. I take it along with me no matter what. It’s with my keys and watch. Just something that is taken along wherever I go. I’m a fool for pens. And watches. And notebooks.

Lewis Edson Waterman started the company in New York City in 1833.

Why is the Waterman Hemisphere Ballpoint pen my pen of choice?

- It just feels right. The body is not too fat, or too skinny. Like the bear and Goldilocks’ bed - “it’s just right.”

- It looks good. I’m not vain, but who wants to tote an ugly pen. However, I do have some great looking pens that just don’t feel right or write very good. I’ve got a great looking bright red Swiss Army pen. But it’s a little too big for everyday carrying around. And it doesn’t write particularly well.

- It’s affordable. This pen won’t flatten your wallet. It’s not as cheap as a PaperMate (another favorite) or a Parker. But it’s not nearly as expensive as Mont Blanc or other esoteric/luxury pens. You can get a stainless steel version for about $25. These enamel ones will run you about $35 or so. Refills are about $4 - slightly more than PaperMate or Parker, but less than Cross.

- THE reason this is my pen of choice - it writes really well. Or good. I love the way it writes. Black ink. Blue ink. Doesn’t matter. Sometimes a pen will write really well with blue ink, or black - but not the other. I’m told there is a difference in the ink, which is why some pens write better in one color over another. I don’t know if it’s true, but from experience I can tell you that I’ve got pens that write great in black, but they don’t in blue. And I’m a black AND blue guy. I write in both colors, but I do prefer blue for some reason. I know it’s not as business-like. Maybe that’s why.

I’m saving my money for this version of the Hemisphere - classy RED. I like red and other bright colors. Why do I need multiple colors? Why do birds fly? Fish swim? Because. I just have the need.

I might need a black one with gold trim instead of chrome. To match my teeth.

Or a green one. It’s not really smaller. It’s just a smaller picture. They’re all the same size.

My pen collection is reasonably represented with Mont Blanc, Cross, Parker, PaperMate, Pilot, Swiss Army, Foray, Uniball and many more. None are as trustworthy, or perform so consistently as my Waterman Hemisphere.

You know you’re a loyal customer when you’re willing to write more than one sentence about a ballpoint pen! Either that, or you’re just a guy with no life. You decide.

Imagine your job is to trace every cable to its respective source and destination. Seemingly impossible, right? Somehow, over time these wires have been adjusted, added to, and intertwined to the point where confusion is king on this pole. That pole is a metaphor for many lives. At death.

Dying creates havoc. Years of accumulation result in piles of things we don’t even know we’ve got. One thing intersects with other things. Before you know it, we can’t tell where one thing ends and another one begins. Like this pole, our lives are a mess of things. One of these days we’ll get around to decluttering. We’ll set aside some time and sort through it all. We’ll throw out the stuff that has no use. We’ll simplify things. We’ll properly label all this stuff. One of these days.

Death alters our plans. Correction: Death cancels our plans.

Frequently we learn of a death that results in chaos, confusion and complexity for those left alive. Wives (most commonly) are left to put in order the affairs of their dead husbands. Many are clueless about the financial situation of their home. They have even fewer clues about other things.

If you died today - what clutter or confusion would you leave behind?

Unless kazoos count - I never learned how to play a musical instrument. Well, that’s not entirely true. I sat through a few years of piano lessons. Sadly, I hated every moment of it. But as I grow older I struggle to keep my brain alive. It keeps wanting to die on me, like a worn out car battery.

Some months ago I decided I needed to kick start portions of my brain that may have never been energized - and I needed to make vibrant the parts that haven’t gone dormant (yet). Cross word puzzles drive me crazy. Chess is not fun. So I decided to investigate learning to play the guitar.

I have owned guitars in the past. Never did learn to play them, but I have owned them. One of the best was a Martin D something or other - I can’t remember (see, that’s how brain death occurs - your memory just fades).

I always found them hard to fret. The action (the height of the strings relative to the fretboard) always seems too high for my fingers. The result was pain - not something that makes a person want to keep playing. I hit the search engines to find out about lessons and guitars. Pretty soon it became quite clear that lots of people start to learn, but many of them quit. No big surprise really. Most of us are quitters.

Then the reality hit me. Rock and roll is full of drug addicts who can play a pretty mean guitar. How hard can it be? I mean, if Keith Richards can play it (while drunk), surely I can learn to play it while sober!

Let’s be clear. I’m not embarking on finding a way to be Leo Kottke, Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler. I simply want to learn to strum tuneful sounds. Playing songs is the goal. And if I get good enough you know what will have to come next? Voice lessons. Because I’m going to sing. Oh, yes. There will be singing. I refuse to be Mike Campbell to anybody’s Tom Petty. I want to be Tom.

The result of all this investigation led me to a company that makes guitars, Zager Guitars. Denny Zager is a self-professed one hit wonder who recorded, “In The Year 2525.” And I always thought that was Blood, Sweat and Tears. Read more about him here.

Zagar developed two things: an easier to play guitar and an easier method of learning to play. I bought into both of them. Pictured is the guitar I bought some weeks ago. I’m attempting (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to practice 30 minutes a day. My fingers are somewhat sore, but I expect to have nice callouses worked up soon. So far, so good. It helps to have extremely low expectations.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress. If nothing else, my air guitar should be vastly improved. As for my brain, it feels sharper already.

I’m told the Moleskine name is taken from the cover’s finish being reminiscent of the skin of a mole. I don’t know about that, but there are so many things I don’t know about. I do know moles aren’t very attractive creatures.

Look at that face. Even a mom couldn’t stare into that face very face long. None of my Moleskine notebooks have fur, or hair. Yet.

I do, however, find my Moleskine notebooks quite cuddly. Every December I buy a new supply of them. I’ve been doing that for a few years now. I’d love to tell you how incredibly organized I am - how I have them all nicely labeled and properly filed away. Not so.

Rather, I have them laying around. Tucked away in a backpack. Hidden on top of books in a shelf. Stuffed in a carrying bag. If you go to any place where I’ve been hanging out you’re likely to stumble on one. And it could be very dangerous for me. Because I don’t self edit much when I’m taking notes, or writing.

You’re likely to find my serious note-taking involves being blunt and pointed. “Rambling, rambling, rambling.” Comments about a speaker who was boring me to tears with endless dribble. “My takeaway point = he should never speak publicly again.” Comments about the same speaker. “Is that mic for Manute Bol?” This comment referenced the Sudan NBA player who measured 7 feet, 7 inches. The microphone on this occasion was about a foot taller than the speaker at the podium. And it was one of those fixed long necked microphones. It was a funny scene. Can’t remember anything the speaker said. He was overshadowed by the mic.

Yes, I’m a serious note-taker. I love to take notes. I’ve always loved taking notes. And doodling. And making sarcastic comments. I’m very capable of capturing the moment - including small oddities. But there is a craft to taking good notes. And the web is full of great resources. I need to revisit these and devise a new strategy for my 2008 note taking efforts.

Cal Poly has some great information on taking notes.

So does Dartmouth.

Some site named englishcompanion even has resources on note taking.

LifeHacker has a blog entry on the craft.

Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomson-Nelson, wrote about it in 2005.

And just yesterday, Tim Ferris made his contribution.

Note taking is all the rage. I’d share with you my wisdom for taking notes, but mostly I do it to entertain myself. If I capture something meaningful along the way - it’s completely accidental. That doesn’t diminish my seriousness about it. It’s a craft that I have practiced for many years. I’m very accomplished at it.

I’ve made notes of songs I heard that I really liked. I’ve listed book titles. Quotes. Jokes. Funny stories. Sad stories. Flight information. Names and phone numbers, or email addresses. Websites. Planned vacations, that I never took. Recorded goals that I’ll never accomplish. Written down my weight at a specific moment in time. Recorded lines from movies, like this one from Canadian Bacon: “We have ways of making you pronounce your O’s.” (Said to a Canadian Mountie, played by Stephen Wright, by an American after Wright pronounced “about” in typical Canadian fashion.)

I’ve taken notes at funerals, weddings, in airports, on airplanes, during TV shows, at home, at work and in the bathroom. My note-taking ability knows few boundaries. I date my notes. I don’t have a fancy indexing system. I should. My Moleskines are a living timeline of my life.

Sometimes my Moleskines have served as a mini-filing systems for me to insert something cut out of a magazine or newspaper. Receipts, business cards, and coupons can also be found inside many of my Moleskines. And there are also Post-It Notes. Post-It Notes? Stuck to pages of my Moleskines. I know. It makes no sense to stick a Post-It Note on the page of a note taking book.

But I’m crazy. And if you ever get your hands on my Moleskines you’ll know. Which is why I’ve determined that in 2008 I’m going to collect them all and lock them away somewhere. They’re very incriminating.

This CD has been stuck in my player for weeks. Ry Cooder has been one of the most significant music influences - bridging my youth with wherever I happen to be. “Paradise and Lunch” has been in my top 5 since I first heard it 33 years ago (and everything before it was outstanding, too). I confess that I’ve not traversed all the roads with Ry during his Buena Vista Social Club days - but I confess that I own everything he’s ever recorded for public consumption. If you’ve never heard Ry Cooder - or solid Americana music - then get to know Buddy or dive into Paradise and Lunch.

Click here to listen to an interview with Ry on NPR.

Here’s the story behind My Name Is Buddy, according to NoneSuch Records, the label.

Not quite two years ago, Ry Cooder was knee-deep in some ninth-inning tinkering, finishing up his forthcoming album, Chavez Ravine, when a peculiar message sailed in - one could say - from deep out-of-left-field.It arrived by way of U.S. Mail, slipped into a nondescript, manila envelope, addressed in an old friend’s recognizable scrawl. Inside, he found a familiar image of the great bluesman, Leadbelly. Yet, photo-shopped in place of his face was that of a red cat; an inscrutable, seen-it-all expression hovering in his eyes. He found little else, except a web address and this note: “You’ll know what to do with this.”

But not right away. After some initial poking around to learn this red cat’s name (”Buddy”) and a bit of his vagabond story (he was found in the alley behind a record store in Vancouver, living in a suitcase, and he’d passed away in 2005), he pushed it aside to tie up pressing loose ends. But the notion had already crawled up inside somewhere deep in his imagination.

“Over time something was coming to me,” he says. Propulsive rhythms and hardscrabble stories and scraps of ocher-toned melodies began to spin ’round inside. “I kept thinking ‘red cat’… and I kept hearing an old Charlie Poole song - a cadence.” It began to slide together. “He’s a red cat - not just red colored - but he’s a union man. He becomes Red.” Next, a piece of lyric. ‘I’m a red cat til I die…’ ” Soon enough, the itinerant Buddy had a back-story; some fellow travelers he meets along the road - Lefty the Mouse, the Reverend Tom Toad - a past and a future; a story to tell.

“‘My Name Is Buddy’: Another Record by Ry Cooder” is, in a certain respect, Ry Cooder circling back, revisiting a body of music that has for much of his life held a certain fascination. “When I first started doing records. I thought, ‘I like these old songs. These dustbowl songs.’ So I made a couple of records and people thought: ‘What’s this?’ You can’t sell this.’ But I kept making these things, again and again, because I knew a good song,” he says. “I’d say it’s taken me 40 years to get it right.”

If Chavez Ravine was Ry Cooder’s musical palimpsest, his re-imagining of a lost neighborhood, a lost way of life, “My Name is Buddy” is the next chapter revisiting those themes of displacement, disenfranchisement, deteriorating democracy - but through the story of a band of friends, in the tradition of Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “Pogo to me was a roadmap to life. Animals are perfect characters because they don’t say much. They’re beautiful metaphors. Very solid, not so hard to understand.”

Part allegory, part picaresque adventure, the album takes up where Chavez Ravine left off. It continues Cooder’s examination of a disappearing America, in this case the vanishing American “working man”. “Nowadays nobody wants to be called a ‘working man’ - an SUV driver maybe - but not a working man.” But what happened to this message of unity? Of solidarity? Of fairness or justice? What happened to the notion, “we are many, they are few.”? These questions put Cooder on a path revisiting the place where so many of those old stories and struggles have been stowed away for safe-keeping; the country’s foundation of music - its songs of praise, of sorrow, of work, of protest, of celebration. “What do poor people sing about? Death, Jesus, Mother and what happened today. They lived in poverty or worked in the mill and got their fingers chopped off - something horrible like that - but they carried that music along with them.”

Buddy’s suitcase, says Cooder, is “like his trailer, his Airstream, you could say” - but his travels aren’t just geographical. While the album weaves through a history of American, regional music - blues, folk, bluegrass with flavors of storefront spirituals and lounge jazz folded in, it also takes a turn through America’s philosophical soul - songs of strivers, of union men, church folk and those down-at-the-heel heroes. If the music feels familiar, their melodies recognizable, they should, says Cooder. Many of them have hovered in our collective backspace for decades. “Most of these songs are based on other tunes, some of them hymns.” Shot through as well are nods or allusions to Reverend Gary Davis, Earl Robinson, Harland Howard, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, the protest songs of labor organizer and songwriter, Joe Hill.

Like Chavez Ravine, telling a specific story freed him: “I had to forget about Ry Cooder and tell this story.” (The scope’s span surprised him. What didn’t fit within the space of a song, become an accompanying book - the text written by Cooder the illustrations cleverly imagined and deftly drawn by artist Vincent Valdez - provides context. “The songs are a little more light- hearted,” says Cooder, “and the stories, a little darker, fill in the background.”)

To tell it properly, musically, Cooder went to key source folk” - tenders of the True Vine of American hearth music: He traveled to Beacon, N.Y., and sat in with Mike and Pete Seeger for an historic session (”J. Edgar”) in Pete’s living room, featuring the two brothers on twin banjos. He rounded up bluegrass mandolin maestro Roland White and Cheftains leader Paddy Maloney. He called on old friends and frequent musical companions, Jim Keltner, Van Dyke Parks, Flaco Jimenez, Mike Elizondo and his son, Joachim Cooder. And though there are standout cameos by jazz musicians Jacky Terrasson and Stefon Harris (”Green Dog”), it’s not a cross-genre/cross-generation jam-session.

“I’ve always been interested in American vernacular music. How people sat in separate towns and wrote songs and played their instruments. I’ve always been interested in how they arrived at the songs, how they got into them, who taught them how to play their guitar, their fiddle. How they learned to hold it. And how it changed, from town to town, every 20 miles or so, like language, And how, before recordings, it all spread throughout America.”

Though, “My Name is Buddy,” feels authentic, like some lost artifact plucked out of time, it is full of urgent resonance. “We’re not doing this,” Cooder stresses, “to be nostalgic.” — especially when so many of the same issues plague and flummox us today - bigotry, poverty, violence, greed, fair-access.

“I loved these songs; I love the melodies and the messages. These songs are a template,” says Cooder. The idea is to craft them into something your own. “Many of these songs had a warning to the ‘working man’ folded in - especially those 19th Century songs in three-quarter time. It was the very reason for singing. Those songs were about topical things. They were vehicles for people who had a point to get across,” says Cooder. “Otherwise, there is no point in doing it.”

Lynell George
December 2006

Movement and motion don’t necessarily equal action, growth or progress. Yet most of us sometimes find comfort in motion - thinking we’re doing something that may actually benefit us in reaching a goal. But when the accomplishment doesn’t happen we may buy into that stupid notion that we must “try harder.”

The key is knowing what to do. It’s an oversimplification for sure. I mean, if we knew exactly what to do - we’d do it. Right?

Not necessarily. How many of us have spurned the offer to be taught something - or to be taught something more correctly. As I grow older I find it quite rare to find people who really are interested in learning. Most of us don’t like to admit ignorance. We also find it somewhat repulsive that somebody else might know more about something, or be better at something. I mean, who died and made them the expert? Yeah, we don’t need their help. We don’t need help from anybody.

We’ll just grow on our own. We don’t need anything. We’re pretty stupendous already.

Seeds grow if all the conditions are right. The soil has to be sufficient to fuel the growth. Water has to be present in the proper amounts. Sunlight is essential. Protection from pests and other harmful elements (like frost) is also vital. There are many elements at work. It may not seem there’s much motion or activity happening, but at the molecular level things are quite busy. Growth and progress happen at a miraculous pace. There is nothing passive about growth - for us or the seedling.

With age comes hardheadedness. The lack of desire to learn something new. The insufficient desire to acknowledge that we can get better. Growth stops. Learning we once took for granted slips. Skills diminish. Some of it brought about by age - nature’s toll booth hits all of us.

Young or old would do well to learn that motion does not equal action or growth. Sometimes our growth is best served by stopping. Stop doing what you’re doing - especially if what you’re doing isn’t working. Sit down and closely examine if your actions are taking you closer to your goal. If not, why not? Is there somebody who can help you better see what actions might help you accomplish more?

Push harder is not a great strategy unless you’re doing the correct things - but not doing them with sufficient effort. Putting forth more effort is sometimes exactly what’s needed, but more often than not, in my experience, doing things differently is what’s in order. You’ll sometimes hear coaches talk about a loss by saying they’re not disappointed with the team’s effort. Translation: “We’re not doing the things necessary to win, but we’re quite busy losing.”

It takes the same effort - maybe more - to lose as it does to win. The difference is in knowing what to do, and being able to do it. Losers continue to practice losing, hoping that their motions will lead them to the Promised Land of Winning. Winners do things differently. Many don’t even work as hard, but the motions they do take - move them closer to more winning.

The question isn’t, “Are you busy?” The better question is, “What are you busy doing?” And, “Is it working?”